


Rock Star

by morganya



Category: Bandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-07-11
Updated: 2007-07-11
Packaged: 2017-10-20 06:58:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,496
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/pseuds/morganya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He was airbrushed, made up, recreated entirely. It wasn't William so much as the idea of a rock star."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rock Star

"I'm representing us," William said again. "I'm going to make sure we're memorable."

He was standing in the middle of the store, holding T-shirts against his chest in the mirror. To his right was the pile of discarded items that William had deemed either not rock star material or non-representative of their sound. There was some delicate balance of the two that he was trying to achieve and that Mike wasn't getting.

"I thought we were kinda memorable already," Mike said. He was bored. He wanted a smoke. William didn't seem likely to stop reevaluating himself any time soon.

"We are, but I was thinking, interviews and whatever, they have to know what we're all about before I even open my mouth. It's more honest."

"I don't know what was wrong with the old stuff," Mike said. "We spent a lot less on clothes."

"Well, that's what I mean, we were just, like, kids in a band. We're not now. We're serious professional musicians and I need to look right."

"You're not going to make me buy new stuff, are you?"

"It wouldn't _hurt_ , Mike."

"I can't play unless I'm comfortable."

"They'll be comfortable. Eventually."

"I like it the way it is."

"I'll be the rock star, then." William smoothed his hair. He held a paisley print up. "What about this? Do I look like Ian Curtis, or what?"

"Too yellow," Mike said, resigning himself to a long afternoon. "So what do I say when you get on all the magazine covers, and they ask me for a quote about your style or whatever? 'Bill spends five hours looking at himself in the mirror -'"

" _William_ , dude. You say to them, 'William spends five hours looking at himself in the mirror.'"

"I can't get used to calling you that."

"It's my name, man."

"Yeah, but I've been saying Bill for years."

"Well, you can still call me Bill. Magazine people don't need to call me that, though."

"Because it looks better on a marquee, right?"

"It's more serious. I am a serious grownup person," William said. "I don't want people looking at my band and saying, 'That guy looks like a kid and we better not listen to what they're saying.'"

 _My band_. That was the other thing. William - Bill - had been saying 'my band' in conversation for the past month. It wasn't like he ever said maliciously, just unconsciously; Mike would roll out of bed in the morning and William would be in a chair by the window, sprawled out and saying into the phone, saying, "My band's gonna be in Texas," or "I'm so proud of my band." It was like a verbal tic; he didn't even know if William heard himself half the time.

It was true that it was his band, just like it was Mike's, or Siska's, or even Butcher's or Tom's. William was just more comfortable saying that it was his. It wasn't worth fighting about.

"Mike," William said. He held up two shirts, a charcoal-colored polo and a black and silver long-sleeved shirt. "Give me your opinion."

"You know more about this stuff than I do."

"Yeah, but you've got outside eyes. You'll be honest with me."

"I don't know. The silvery one."

William held it up and examined it critically. "Not too New Wave-y?"

"Well, what do you think you should look like, Bill?" He sounded more snappish than he meant to; he'd been standing there for forty-five minutes and everything was kind of starting to look the same. "You know better than me."

"I don't know." Bill irritably tossed both the shirts aside. "What _do_ rock stars look like, anyway?"

*****

They'd all kind of decided early on that William would be responsible for the interviews; he was the lead singer, he wrote the lyrics, and he was better at catering to the press than the rest of them were. William was more than happy to preach the gospel of The Academy Is... Butcher and Adam were more comfortable with playing comic relief while someone else fielded the more serious questions, and, if he was forced to do it, Mike would put himself and Tom into the same category, where they both got nervous and tongue-tied in interview situations and could barely get through a sentence without sounding like freaks. William got nervous, but he had some weird sense of how to turn it to his advantage, and he would look sensitive and intellectual and poetic if he stuttered or stumbled over his words. William was a mutable quality; he changed personas like changing socks, depending on who was talking to him.

It was easier with girls, William told him once. If it was a lady asking the questions, he had a better sense of what he wanted to say, how he wanted to put things. "I don't know what it is with guys," he'd told Mike. "I look at them asking me stuff and I keep thinking of every asshole who called me a faggot back in school."

Privately Mike thought that it had a lot to do with how girls reacted to William. They all wanted to either sleep with him or mother him. He kept that particular thought to himself.

"They made Bill look all cover girly here," Siska told him in the bus. William was being interviewed by some college radio station with initials that Mike couldn't remember and Butcher and Tom were off somewhere together (peas in a pod), which left Siska and him in the bus. Siska was kind of tuning his bass and kind of looking at the magazines and news clippings spread across the table. "Like Tyra Banks or something."

They tried not to read their press. No one ever really got it, in the way they were supposed to get it, and it was frustrating. But at the same time it was pretty normal to want to know what everyone thought of them. Mike was fairly sure it was normal, anyway. So they just kept the press clippings and tried not to read them, sometimes more successfully than other times.

"Yeah," Mike said. "Tyra Banks. Right. Totally."

"You know what I mean," Siska said. "Look how ugly I am here, dude."

Mike looked. A group shot, the five of them staring off in various directions, away from the camera eye. Siska stabbed at his own face with an index finger.

"What? It's fine," Mike said. "We all look the same."

"I know," Siska said glumly. "I kinda don't want to look like myself."

"C'mon," he said, trying to be reassuring, but then he realized that he'd been wrong, that they didn't all look the same. William wasn't the same. There seemed to be five hundred photos of William on the table, and none of them really looked like the William he knew. He was airbrushed, made up, recreated entirely. It wasn't William so much as the idea of a rock star.

Mike thought: _But this is what he does._ William had been trying to turn into a rock star for as long as Mike had known him. They'd all been trying. But William was better at it.

"I wish I could be like him," Siska said, still staring at the photo.

Mike looked up, startled, like he'd been caught talking to himself. "What?"

"Bill. He's like what everyone wants." Siska covered the photo with the palm of his hand. "Ever notice that when he goes on stage, everyone screams like ten times louder than they do for us?"

"He's the singer. They know the show's about to start." It sounded naïve even in his head.

"No, it's because it's _him_. He's what everyone wants," Siska said again. "All those girls. Everyone."

He put a hand on Siska's shoulder. "Dude, they all talk about you on the internet and shit. How cute you are."

"It's not the same," Siska said. "I'm still just Adam, you know? Bill's the rock star now."

Mike didn't have anything to say to that, because he had the feeling it was true. William was the rock star, and he didn't know where that left the rest of them.

*****

William gave himself to everyone, and it made them love him more. It wasn't just the fans. The fans would love William just for coming out on stage and smiling, but it was like he felt obligated to reach out to them, _seduce_ them in - it wouldn't be a show without a flash of William's pale sharp hipbone, hand wrapped around the mike like a lover's waist, the other raised up in a motion that was half-beckoning and half-affirming. Sometimes, if Mike happened to look up from his guitar and see past the hot stage lights into the crowd, he'd see a line of girls in front, raising their hands back to William, beckoning back.

But it wasn't just the fans. When they were on stage, William gave all of himself to them, to the performance, and then, off stage, he did the same to everyone who came into his immediate orbit. Gabe and Travis and Shaant and Pete, they all had a piece of William as well, and they loved him for it.

Shaant seemed to realize that William wasn't exactly about to be tied down, and Mike always wondered if it hurt him a little; on the phone sometimes, his voice had a little catch of longing when he asked about William, and if William happened to be talking to him, he'd always sound sympathetic and placating, like he was trying to smooth the hurt over. Gabe loved the parts of himself that he saw reflected in William, the wildness and ambition, and he was always playing the tempter, just a little farther, Bill, let's see how far we can go. Travis loved William like a tease, like a schoolboy crush, the two of them dancing around each other, playing like kids, the two of them so different and so alike at the same time. Pete loved William the way he couldn't help loving, greedily, almost engulfingly. Pete got into people's heads without meaning to (or only sort of meaning to), until there was no separation between him and anyone else. He'd done it with Patrick, and he'd done it with Ryan. It was just how he was.

Mike had known this about William. He'd watched him leave and come back a thousand times, always smiling and saying how happy he was to be back, and then flitting off to the next thing. William said that it'd be good for all of them if he went out and did other things every so often, get the name out, bring in more potential fans, but Mike was sure that he loved it too, for reasons having nothing to do with the band.

Mike had loved it at first, too, because it made William happy, and possessiveness had never really been his thing. Of course everyone would be in love with William. It was inevitable.

It had a lot to do with the thousand nights he'd spent wrapped around William's skinny back, in hotel rooms, in tour bus bunks, all the way back to being two freaked out kids making their lives up as they went along. He'd thought, that was something no one else had. William could go away from them a million times, but Mike always thought that he'd be sure to come back, back to the band and back to Mike.

Now he wasn't sure what to think, because William was going a thousand miles an hour, giving himself away as he went, and Mike just felt like he was standing still.

*****

William was at the computer when Mike wandered into the front lounge searching for his phone. William flapped a hand at him distractedly and said, "Exactly how late is sound check going to be tonight?"

"I don't know. Thirty minutes. I'm hoping. I don't know."

"Why even bother with a bus if it's just going to fuckin' break down all the time? I liked the van better."

"The van fuckin' broke down all the time too," Mike said. "Plus, you know, there was your driving."

"I drive fine." William frowned at the computer screen, squinting a little.

"Uh-huh," Mike said. He poked at his phone. The battery was completely dead. "Have you seen my charger?"

"I don't know, check my bunk."

"There's no outlet in there. Why would it be there?"

William didn't answer. Something changed in the air around him, a kind of thrumming tension, coming off of his suddenly knotted shoulders. He didn't look up.

"Bill?" Mike said. "Hey, what -"

William sucked his breath in, hissing like he'd burned himself, jerking away from his chair and the laptop in front of him. His mouth had gone stiff and thin.

"Bill? _Bill._ " He'd dealt with William's mood swings, had gotten to a point where he knew the right combination of joking and reassurance that would stop him from going off the rails entirely, but this was something new, and Mike wasn't good at improvising. "What? What happened?"

"Nothing," William said. "Nothing, nothing. I thought - I thought there was a spider or something. Freaked me out."

William wasn't afraid of bugs. William was a shitty liar. He was opening the refrigerator now, grabbing a beer and cracking it open while he leaned against the wall - _look at me, see how relaxed I am_ \- but his hands were shaking and there was beer foaming over his wrist. "Fuck. I'll get it."

"What'd you see?" Mike took a step towards the computer. "What happened?"

" _No,_ " William said. "Mike, don't. Don't. I got it, it's fine."

He looked at the laptop anyway, ignoring William. For a second, it just looked like any email program on the screen, a hell of a lot of messages but still just email. William said again, "I don't want you to look."

Mike looked anyway.

Every single message seemed to be about William, what they wanted to do to him, what they wanted him to do to them. It was like the porn spam that showed up in everyone's inbox, except whoever was writing seemed to know details about William. His mom's name. His sisters' names. Speculating on why William's parents got divorced. Running through every message was the same thing: _I'll fuck you until you're dead. You're mine._

There were pictures inserted into some of the messages. Young girls with hungry eyes and nervous poses, naked as Eve, unobscured by the cheap cell phone photographs. Mike jerked away from the screen.

"I don't even know," William said thinly. "How they got my email. How they knew - Mike, they're my kid sister's age, practically, I can't - how'd they know all that stuff, what have they -"

"I don't know either." His stomach felt weird. He wanted to take a shower. "Jesus fuck, Bill."

"I'll - I don't know, I guess I'll change it or something. The address. Mike, they said all this stuff about my _mom_ , I don't -"

"Tony'll handle it," Mike said. "He knows how to trace this stuff, or he knows someone, I don't know."

"No. You can't tell anyone. Nobody."

"They're fucking freaks."

"I was just too out there," William said. He grabbed another beer, cracked it open, gulped it down. He was still shaking. "I did - they feel like they know you anyway, you know? They don't understand. They're just kids."

He didn't know who William was trying to convince. "They can't talk like that to you."

"It's not talk. It's email. I'll change the address. I'll do - something." He put the beer can down. His mouth was white around the edges. "I'll - I don't know."

Mike didn't answer. He didn't know what to do either.

*****

William changed his email address and then insisted that everything was fine now. Mike told him that he needed to tell someone about it, Tony, Bob, anyone, but William just gave him a look and said, "I'm _handling_ it, Mike."

Except when William came wandering into the back lounge after the show was over to ask if Mike wanted to come along on a run to 7-Eleven for supplies, he had his baseball cap tugged down low over his eyes, and there was something too studiedly casual in his manner, the way he slouched in the door, not knowing where to put his hands. Mike said, "What about what's his name, the new guy? He can go grab something for you."

"I can't sit in the bus all night," William said. "I'm losing my mind."

Mike looked at him. William shrugged and said, "Anyway, I can't find what's his name."

Mike followed him out. William didn't seem to want to wait for him; he charged ahead on long coltish legs, keeping an almost fixed distance between the two of them. Mike thought, _What the fuck, why'd you even ask, you don't want to be seen with me._

Except then he saw the defeated set of William's skinny shoulders, the way he walked without taking his eyes off the ground, and he realized that he was wrong - William was just keeping Mike from being seen with _him_.

William had been shouldering it all, Mike thought, taking the interviews that nobody else wanted to do, going to the endlessly boring photo shoots, listening to the same questions being asked over and over again, dealing with the creepy emails and letters. William was the rock star, and everyone else could just be normal, for better or worse.

It was a lot to expect one person to deal with.

William came to a stop outside the 7-Eleven and checked that Mike was still there. Mike lit a cigarette. William said, "You want anything?"

"Tater Tots."

"Sick, dude. Your funeral." William opened the door.

The store looked like it was empty, basically; Mike watched through the glass window, seeing William's posture relax until he looked more like himself. Mike turned back to the parking lot.

He heard her before he saw her: a sharp gasp, a low moan of recognition. She looked like any other girl in jeans and a white hoodie. She was coming up to the door, very fast, talking into her cell phone in an excited gabble before flipping it off.

He tried to be nice to the fans, he really did, even when they baffled him. Except he wasn't sure he could be nice now; she had this look in her eyes - avaricious, blind to anything but William's form inside the store. There was that hungry look he'd seen before. _I'll eat you up._

She didn't notice him until he stepped in front of the door, blocking her path. She stared dumbly at him, like the sky had fallen in front of her. Mike exhaled a plume of smoke at her, staring right back. Neither of them spoke.

She winced. He kept staring. He hoped William wouldn't come out yet.

Finally she sneered at him (at least some recognition), and turned away. Before she walked away, he heard her get back on the cell phone, spitting out something about, "Beckett's asshole bodyguard."

He checked to see that William hadn't seen any of that. It looked like he was just walking up to the register.

If it meant one less thing that William had to deal with, then Mike was more than happy to be the asshole.

*****

Back at the bus, William sprawled out on the seat, scribbling in his notebook while Mike sat and tuned his guitar a few feet away. It was already pretty much in tune, but he needed something in his hands while he figured stuff out.

There were shadows and ashes under William's pale skin, eyes puffy like he hadn't slept. God only knew how much shit he had to deal with tomorrow.

"Hey," Mike said, and put the guitar down.

William looked up at him. "Hmm?"

"Maybe I could start doing a few of the interviews," Mike said. "You know. If you get busy."

William looked at him like he'd grown another head. "You hate interviews."

"I don't hate them."

"You said that you never know what to say."

"I can talk about the band all day, dude. That's all they care about."

"You know that I can handle it," William said, irritably. "If you're just offering because you think I'm not doing a good job -"

"C'mon, Bill. I want to be a rock star too. You and me, we'll be rock stars together."

William looked at him. Mike said, "Our band, right?"

William smiled a little. He slid across the seat, putting his legs across Mike's lap. "You've always been the rock star in the family, Mike."

"I need practice," Mike said. He put a hand on William's thigh, rubbing circles with his thumb.

"What if you hate it? Doing all that stuff."

"Dunno," Mike said. "Why don't we just make it up as we go along?"

William watched him, his smile a little faraway. "Haven't we always?"


End file.
